National Review Online
Monday, November 30, 2020
President Trump said the other day that he’d leave office
if he loses the vote of the Electoral College on December 14.
This is not the kind of assurance presidents of the
United States typically need to make, but it was noteworthy given Trump’s
disgraceful conduct since losing his bid for reelection to Joe Biden on
November 3.
Behind in almost all the major polls, Trump stormed
within a hair’s breadth in the key battlegrounds of winning reelection, and his
unexpectedly robust performance helped put Republicans in a strong position for
the post-Trump-presidency era. This is not nothing. But the president can’t
stand to admit that he lost and so has insisted since the wee hours of Election
Night that he really won — and won “by a lot.”
There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020
vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes
(some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count),
but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the
past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of
the American people. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards,
desperately trying to find something, anything to support the
president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the
evidence and reacting as warranted.
Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has
withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is
remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of
already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting
systems. Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots
in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a
rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in
the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general. A straight
apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were
requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots
were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned.
Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the
public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing
things said by the president of the United States.
Elected Republicans have generally taken the attitude
that the president should be able to have his day in court. It’s his legal
right to file suits, of course, but he shouldn’t pursue meritless litigation in
Hail Mary attempts to get millions of votes tossed out. This is exactly what
he’s been doing, it’s why reputable GOP lawyers have increasingly steered
clear, and it’s why Trump has suffered defeat after defeat in court.
In its signature federal suit in Pennsylvania, the Trump
team argued that it violated the equal-protection clause of the U.S.
Constitution for some Pennsylvania counties to let absentee voters fix or
“cure” their ballots if they contained an error while other counties didn’t. It
maintained that it was another constitutional violation for Trump election
observers not to be allowed in close proximity to the counting of ballots. On
this basis, the Trump team sought to disqualify 1.5 million ballots and bar the
certification of the Pennsylvania results or have the Pennsylvania General
Assembly appoint presidential electors.
By the time the suit reached the Third Circuit, it had
been whittled down to a relatively minor procedural issue (whether the Trump
complaint could be amended a second time in the district court). The Trump team
lost on that question, and the unanimous panel of the Third Circuit (in an
opinion written by a Trump appointee) made it clear that the other claims
lacked merit as well. It noted that the suit contained no evidence that Trump
and Biden ballots or observers were treated differently, let alone evidence of
fraud. Within reason, it is permissible for counties to have different
procedures for handling ballots, and nothing forced some counties to permit
voters to cure flawed absentee ballots and others to decline to do so.
Not that it mattered. The court pointed out that the suit
challenged the procedures to fix absentee ballots in seven Democratic counties,
which don’t even come close to having enough cured ballots to change the
outcome in the state; the counties might have allowed, at most, 10,000 voters
to fix their ballots, and even if every single one of them voted for Biden,
that’s still far short of Biden’s 80,000-plus margin in the state.
The idea, as the Trump team stalwartly maintains, that
the Supreme Court is going to take up this case and issue a game-changing
ruling is fantastical. Conservative judges have consistently rejected Trump’s
flailing legal appeals, and the justices are unlikely to have a different
reaction.
Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt,
somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to block the
certification of votes and state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in
clear violation of the public will. This has gone nowhere, thanks to the
honesty and sense of duty of most of the Republicans involved, but it’s a
profoundly undemocratic move that we hope no losing presidential candidate ever
even thinks of again.
Getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the
ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders
personal feelings of bitterness and anger. What America has long expected is
that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be
gracious. If Trump’s not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on
the outcome.
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